Wednesday, 14 December 2016

Ridiculing a radical

You don’t have to know much about television to realise that production companies function from the premise that everyone is gagging to appear on telly. This assumption gives film crews a sense of entitlement which inspires everyone, from the producer to the lackey in charge of charging up the batteries, to be as dismissive and insulting to the…let’s call them actors…..as they choose.

He has obediently taken this project in the spirit in which it was intended, i.e., a vehicle for making Muslims look whacky and cool and ‘just like us’. Jim White willingly plays along with the theory that getting the ‘just like us’ Muslims to ridicule a radical would be enough to make us all realise that, phew, the Muslims are fundamentally just like us - et voilà! Instant cure for Islamophobia.

It was heartening to see that most of the below the line comments weren’t quite so sure.

“A woman in an elegant headscarf, knotted almost like a turban, is explaining her beliefs. Her name is Humaira and she is, she says, a sort of ‘radical moderate’. She seems articulate, educated, rational.And then her throat tightens, and she adds: ‘British values for me are colonialism, institutional racism and theft, and genocide.’The disturbing fact is that Humaira really is one of the more moderate voices in Muslims Like Us, the two-part BBC2 reality show that puts ten Muslims in a house in York and gleefully films their furious arguments over faith and Islamic culture.”

For me, there was far too much emphasis on the deluded Abdul Haqq, whose radicalisation was triggered by a childhood ruined and humiliated by his given names: ‘Anthony + Small’- and who could blame him?

I mean, what else could one do under the circumstance, other than turn to Islam? Not just any old Islam but the full English M & S Islam of the most foul incarnation, in an absurdist - or do I mean absurd - quest for meaning and manliness?

All the handwringing and agonising over the ethics of including Abdul in this TV extravaganza was disingenuous in my opinion. The BBC and Love Productions put him in for two reasons.

Without him it might be: a) a bit boring, and b) it might make the Muslims look less ‘like us’ than the BBC intended.

It’s simple. They put him in for contrast, if you like. Didn’t work though, did it? They still looked unlike us with or without Abdel and his leaflets on Islam at its most absurd.

The second episode was much worse, in documentary terms. Not only was it chaotic and badly crafted, but the Big Brother format was showing badly. Bigly and badly. You could almost hear the brainstorming meeting with the company throwing around their best, most hackneyed Big Brother tactics. It would be exactly like W1A. Siobhan would suggest provoking more action by introducing some random local infidels. Cue four locals, an atheist, an actress, a prostitute and a vicar, (or something) striding purposefully along the pavement towards the B.B. house. If the perennial cliché (meaningful camera shot of their feet) was absent, I must have included it mentally.

I suppose it was an excuse to discover which of the Muslims would refuse to honour the war dead. Most of them duly obliged. Then a trip to York Minster so they could fail to be moved by the perpendicular architecture and have a great big row on a parapet.

The remainder of the programme was a series of rows, squabbles, accusations and anger. Everyone was at loggerheads with everyone else and the (Shia) Muslima got upset when she tearfully provoked a confused Abdul (Sunni) into more or less admitting that he believed she should be shot.

The least devout participant of all who, throughout, had tried to distance herself from some of the goings-on suddenly had a little indignant rant about English people’s inability to learn unfamiliar, ‘foreign’ names, and she found their automatic tendency to anglicise them insulting. She didn’t see it as a friendly gesture, as might have been intended.

The whole exercise was quite absurd; its aim, its execution and its vacuousness. I did enjoy the girl with the most unIslamic dress code, the highest heels and the reddest lips (Mehreen) being disarmingly honest, personal and sort of charming, by admitting, to camera, that she used to have a monobrow, and adding sheepishly “and a moustache….. and a beard”. "Asian girls can be hairy", she mused.

4 comments:

I would say Abdul Haqq was the least deluded one in the house. Everything he said about Islam he could justify by reference to the Koran, Hadith and Sharia Law. The others had to resort to leaving the room, ridicule and social displacement activity (complaining about him not pulling his weight in the kitchen). They had neither the will nor the knowledge to provide any counter-arguments. What Abdul actually said about what Islam was seemed to me completely unremarkable - the sort of thing broadcast on all the main Islamic TV channels for instance. The only difference is that unlike most scholars and clerics he didn't bother to dress it up to avoid frightening the kaffirs, as is the usual way.

This is one of the reasons why the "liberal Islam" delusion is dangerous - because it masks the reality that the small minority of liberal Muslims really have few arguments to put up against the mainstream interpretation (as supplied by scholars and clerics). The liberals can only disengage from argument and engage with the majority culture - fine in itself but not leading to fundamental reform.

Additional thoughts: This harkens back to the old, relevant days of Biased BBC, when 'John Reith' and others from the BBC engaged in debate about this very issue. Nothing has changed at all since then, not a single lesson learned. Back then we were told to shut up and let the BBC get on with their Social Cohesion mission and bringing people together. I and others kept telling him and them that they were going about it the wrong way. It was always, "Don't Panic, I'm Islamic", "White Girl", and other attempts to push only one side of the argument, to convince only one side to accomodate. They never, ever do shows trying to tell Mohammedans that maybe there was more to British heritage than racism and colonialism, and it was in their best interests to reach out to their neighbors and integrate a little.

The problem is that most Beeboids - especially those in production and upper management - agree with Humaira's assessment. So everyone at the BBC is constitutionally unable to address the issue in a helpful manner. Ten years on, they're still getting it wrong.

No change in management structure will fix this. No streamlining of divisions will keep this from happening again. No cap on executive payouts or salary will make them stop pulling this crap. The endless rounds of training and away days, BBC College of Journalism courses, or stroppy memos from the top have done nothing to resolve this corporation-wide, long-term failure of judgment and duty. Only a massive, root and branch purge will even begin to change this problem.

Sadly the indoctrination by the BBC has been so successful that the problems within the BBC and the wider liberal/left are self-perpetuating. For decades they have preyed on fears about appearing nationalistic, which paradoxically was never a strong part of British culture, to the extent of making any celebration of our own culture not only morally unacceptable but impossible. It is very easy for the left to claim that that there is no such thing as a British way of life when they have played such a large part in destroying it.